It will understandably come as a surprise to many that this book is not about violence. Austin Zeiderman takes pains to clarify this in his introduction, with particular reference to a student who greeted his examination of urban governance of environmental hazards in Bogotá with the phrase ¿ Dónde está la sangre? (‘Where's the blood?’). Zeiderman carefully defines ‘endangerment’ as referring to the precarity associated with his direct areas of concern – risk management in urban governance of disasters, environmental hazards and housing. It is clear throughout his argument, however, that risk in Bogotá is impossible to comprehend without understanding how endemic violence and threat has left indelible scars on the way people perceive and navigate city life. Endangerment hence ‘refers not to direct experiences of violence, but to how violence indirectly conditions urban politics, governance, and everyday life’ (p. 30).
Understanding risk in relation to environmental hazard allows Zeiderman to engage with the theories of urban political economy and neoliberal governmentality. He correctly surmises that these are the most powerful paradigms in contemporary critical urban theory, but that they tend to have been developed with reference to the welfare states of Europe and the United States and the subsequent destructive effects of neoliberalism. However, tracing local genealogies of risk that in Bogotá are inseparable from violence also allows him to provide a critique that centres Colombia's history. Post-colonial scholars have frequently critiqued the unreflexive imposition of critical urban theory on the Global South, or, equally problematically, the exoticisation of cities in the South as unique or different. The main strength of Zeiderman's book is that he manages to position Colombia and Bogotá, through his conceptual lens of endangerment, in such a way that his ethnography speaks to theoretical concerns, without allowing etically generated frameworks to dominate his analysis.
The book proceeds to give an exceptionally rich and engaging ethnographic account of how ideas of risk, and, correspondingly, forms of governance, have developed in Colombia, with reference to tragic events that still reverberate through the nation's consciousness. The historical narrative of Chapter 1, ‘Apocalypse Foretold’, convincingly establishes the connection between current approaches to risk management, informed by governance models developed elsewhere, and Colombia's particular history of ‘massacres of judges and hostages, assassinations of government ministers, floods, earthquakes, and to top it all off, volcanic eruptions’ (pp. 39–41, citing leading Colombia journalist Daniel Samper Pizano). The following three chapters are structured around Zeiderman's fieldwork, starting with his observations at the Caja de la Vivienda Popular, the municipal government's agency for housing, responsible for resettling families living in zones of high risk. We accompany its agents as they construct the city's map of risk, and the connections between risky areas, risky people, and people at risk are traced to the officials’ own interpretations of hazards, dangers and vulnerabilities. The interrelation between risk and poverty is the fulcrum of this chapter, as we are invited to consider not ‘how the poor came to inhabit landscapes of risk’, but rather ‘how […] zones of high risk come to inhabit the territories of the poor’ (p. 66). The following chapter deconstructs the public billboards announcing warnings and highlighting the state's interventions in order to lay bare the paternalist construction of authorities’ role in managing risk. The focus again is on how ‘slums’ became ‘areas of high risk’ and what this means for understandings of informality, extension of the state, and for the individualisation of social and economic problems. The interview material makes it clear that dwellers of these informal settlements, now constructed as ‘high risk’ zones, have gone from being autonomous and powerful people who were able to build and maintain their own houses to individuals who are constructed as irresponsible for not wanting to relocate to a less risky area. The analysis foregrounds the experiences of people living in these ‘at-risk areas’ and the ‘displaced’ and their various negotiations and struggles to assure their rights in this new governance regime.
The final chapters offer theoretical and conceptual reflections about futurity – a concept which is inherent in the idea of risk and the way it is governed. An inventive and elegant intervention is the notion of a ‘subjunctive state’. This idea responds to the call by urbanist AbdouMaliq Simone for an anticipatory urban politics (p. 164) by drawing on the sense of hope, doubt and possibility in the grammatical mood common to Latin languages but used only rarely in English. The concept of the ‘subjunctive state’ brings complexity into assessments of how risky, modern or progressive cities are, and so ‘retemporalize[s] the city’ (p. 200) amidst an increasing tendency to polarise between the global cities of the North and the dystopic mega cities of the South.
Zeiderman's openness about his methodology and own position vis-à-vis the research make this an exceptionally enlightening read. He offers vignettes to clarify how the key questions that shape the book came to light, in particular his own experiences growing up in Philadelphia, and certain key moments in his fieldwork when he came to appreciate the inadequacies of dominant theories about urban governance to portray the political landscape in Colombia. It is this inadequacy that leads him to call on anthropologist James Ferguson's formulation of the ‘progressive arts of government’ to allow an exploration of the potential opportunities presented by techniques of governance that are dismissed as ‘postpolitical’ in much critical literature. Risk management techniques have to be understood in context, as ‘there is no overarching logic of power that replaces what came before; rather, there is an assemblage of overlapping technical, ethical, and political guidelines for how society, the state and the individual are expected to behave’ (p. 102). Opening up this analytical space on the basis of empirical work is often dismissively categorised as ‘atheoretical’ by adherents of critical theory who do not seem to recognise the circularities inherent in that position. However, recognising this complexity is doubtless necessary if urban theory is going to meet the powerful criticism levied against it by postcolonial work on the Global South.
I am extremely sympathetic with Zeiderman's theoretical and political stance, and his methodological approach. I did find myself wishing that more had been made of the potential for a gendered analysis – betraying of course my particular line of interest here. There are numerous examples where the gendered dynamics are described but could have been brought further into the analysis. This would have strengthened his argument even further and led to some apparent contradictions being untangled. We learn about the beatified victimhood of the nine-year-old girl Omayra Sanchez, whose slow death in the aftermath of a mudslide was televised to the horror and collective guilt of the whole country (p. 48); the masculine-coded characteristic of vivo that constructs men as vital and dangerous, typically at the expense of women and girls (p. 148); and the paternalism of Colombian state power and authority. Exploring these gendered and racialised dynamics in the conceptual framework could have further enriched the notions of danger and power that are at play, and explained why, in Zeiderman's words, ‘vulnerability is valorised but vitality is suspect’ (p. 158). Nevertheless, this account is committed to centring the everyday experiences of the governance of risk, endangerment and hazard, and the agency and understandings of the people interviewed come to the fore.
